The Fallacies of Bernie Sanders

Hunter Lewis has rendered a great service with his new book. Writing from an Austrian perspective, he has given us the definitive analysis of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Though Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, he accomplished something remarkable. “If Bernie’s campaign was primarily an exercise in moving public opinion, it was wildly successful. He carried young people by wide margins. He shifted the Democratic Party and eventually its platform in his direction.” (p.1)

How did he do this? “Bernie often says out loud what others are privately thinking.” (p.13) The middle class and the poor are not doing well, he says; and the fault lies in a “rigged’ system. “The economy becomes rigged because the rich, primarily represented by ‘greedy’ billionaires and corporations, use their wealth to subvert the political process and take command of government.” (p.24)

Lewis finds much truth in Sanders’s accusation. In a manifestly corrupt way, for example, failed banks and businesses were “bailed out” after the financial crash of 2008. “[Hank] Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was one of the architects of the Wall Street bailout of 2008 which not only rescued Wall Street, but also rescued his own firm, along with all the shares he still retained in that firm.” (p.132)

If Sanders has correctly identified a major problem, his proposed solution to it would only make matters worse; and in Lewis’s careful pressing home of this claim against Sanders lies the principal contribution of his book.